But despite these sightings, it is the president himself who presents the strongest claims of being in touch and thus supported by the twelfth Imam of the Shiites who is said to be in occultation. For example, â€œAt a meeting with the Foreign Ministers of Islamic countries and in response to a question that Iran displayed signs of a crisis, president Ahmadinejad said that these were the signs of the return of the twelfth Imam, who will definitely return in two yearsâ€ [see Aftab of November 16, 2005]. These words were said at a time when the ultra-religious and conservative journal Khorshid published a handwritten text which it attributed to the twelfth Imam.

Let me explain. In the Iranian leader’s faith, the equivalent of the Rapture will occur after a period of blood and chaos where his side will war and win, and Ahmadinejad believes his actions can hasten the return of the twelfth imam.

So we have a vicious End Times believer with a record of conducting acts of war against the United States that runs longer than many of my readers have been alive.

Acts of war. Well, invading an embassy and taking the staff hostage is pretty much one–although not a huge one as acts of war go; remember, we made a mistake and bombed the Chinese embassy once, although that was due to our own incompetence in the event. Perhaps these other things might fit as acts of war…

Active support for blood and chaos in Iraq, both financial and otherwise

Support for Syria’s oppression of moving assets and fighters against America

Safe haven for AQ and Talib who got away in Afghanistan

A whole lot of nastiness that is directed at our allies, like funding Hezbollah (remember the Marines in Beirut?), Hamas, et cetera

Hamas leader Khalid Meshal met in Tehran with officials of Iran’s mad mullahcracy this past Tuesday. “With respect to the challenges that we have ahead of us, Iran’s role in the future of Palestine should continue and increase,” Meshal said in a joint press conference in Tehran with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

Stated intentions and current actions.

I see no reason not to take the man at his word. If so, this sure is looking like 1936 to me.

I also see that there is a tiny and weak window for the locals in Iran to overthrow their leadership. That window is closing. I would also point to 1936 and mention that the country with a charismatic leader then seemed pretty happy with the direction that country was going. Put that in the equation: the guy was elected no matter that the election was rigged. He’s not reviled by the total of the Iranian populace. It’s not one guy against his own people; it’s a lot of people against…us.

We don’t recognize the proxy war against us. We will see the blood and chaos Ahmahdinejad desires, without his imam arriving. My question to you is: what level of blood and chaos will you decide to sustain amongst your people? We’ve got plenty of squeakers on “our” side, to hide the active duplicity of Iran and the implications of such.

The brinksmanship on the diplomatic work we’ve been doing has been slow in coming. I fear it will fail, because I can’t figure out how to judge when the actions we want to occur are imminent–regime overthrows in a tyranny are necessarily hard to see coming. I also can’t see what the moves are or even what that region of the chessboard looks like.

I fear that within the next two years things will get very very ugly.

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Oh, yes. That link at the top. Here’s an unpleasant little part of it.

Last June Spiegel Online published an interview former hostage David Roeder. Consistent with Bowden’s research, Roeder recalled that Ahmadinejad was “present at at least a third of my personal interrogations, which took place nightly for a little over a month early on in the hostage-taking situation. He seemed to be calling the shots, but from the background. The interrogators would ask a question and it would then be translated from Farsi into English by a woman interpreter.” The Spiegel interviewer then asked Roeder whether his interlocutors exerted pressure on him in these interviews. Roeder responded:

I decided that initially I wasn’t going to respond in any way, shape or form. They had me handcuffed to a chair and at least during the first few sessions, blindfolded as well. But once the blindfold came off, they had developed a plan that Ahmadinejad was instigating. Because I was not cooperating, they threatened that they were going to kidnap my handicapped son and send various pieces of him — fingers and toes is what they mentioned — to my wife if I didn’t start cooperating. You don’t forget somebody who is involved in something like that.

Roeder isn’t sleeping, but Steyn seems to have a point about the rest of us. One would think, among other things, that the United States has a debt of honor to settle with Iran’s odious president.

The United States is not good at settling such things. Robert Stethem’s killer went free in Germany. The Cole attack planners escaped from prison in not-that-helpful Yemen.

2 Responses to “Proxy War and Warmongering”

This guy is basically what the left said Reagan was, with regards to the End Times/Rapture. Only difference is that Ahmadinejad actually believes this stuff. And he has, or soon will have, nuclear weapons. And there’s really not a damned thing we can do about it. You say regime change is hard to see coming, which is true. However, it is quite easy to predict what will happen when you do little to nothing to support that regime change, as we have, or more accurately, failed to do in Iran.

The next two years will be nasty indeed, and when it gets nasty, the chattering classes and the sheep will wake up, with mushroom clouds over their heads, and fail to understand where it all came from.